Hyperaware

People have sympathy towards families when they lose their children or parents or grandparents to “medical” problems.  It doesn’t matter if it is from disease or an accident.  As long as it has a medical reason, people appreciate the loss as being sad and worthy of respect.  When people die from health problems like anorexia, depression, drug addiction, or even obesity, their life is written of as a life wasted and their death results in people making statements such as “good riddance” and “I have no respect for people who for people who kill themselves” with no regard for what might have led to their death.

Many people seem to think that life is something that you can control everything about, even when there are so many things in life that prove otherwise.  So many things happen in a person’s life that can lead them to make bad decisions.  People who just write off people who suffer from some sort of behavioral issue and determine that that person didn’t deserve to be alive are part of the reason that the problems exist in the first place.

So many people who turn to self-destructive behaviors have similar backgrounds, either being abused or living under the roof of someone who is controlling or somehow neglectful.  So many have a genetic predisposition to whatever self-destructive path they take.  These are people who have lived lives that many people wouldn’t be able to handle.  These are people who have suffered through a life filled with so much sadness and horror.  These are people who should be respected and mourned.  They have lived lives that so many others would not be able to handle, including the people who condemn them.

Amy Winehouse is yet another person who is going to be condemned in death as she was in life.  Her history of drug abuse was not something that was a secret. Because of her choice of careers, she was forced to watch her personal life be scrutinized by the public; usually those who had the cruelest things to say were people who didn’t know her at all.  According to Lily Allen, “I know Amy Winehouse very well. And she is very different to what people portray her as being. Yes, she does get out of her mind on drugs sometimes, but she is also a very clever, intelligent, witty, funny person who can hold it together. You just don’t see that side.”  People who knew her thought highly of her, yet so many people who would never meet her would criticize her for her struggles in life.  They would quickly point out that she was a flawed person and that they felt that she deserved no respect.  These people would ignore what made her great and would also ignore what may have caused her to become a statistic.

There are a lot of people who are not self-destructive who have had tragedies in their lives.  I guess for those people, the choices that some make will baffle them.  The thing that they do not understand is that another person’s life is not something that you can easily judge.  We all have things we go through and we all deal with them differently.  When we see someone go through something and they make a bad decision, it can be easy to make some candid remark about that person.  We’re not thinking about it fairly or rationally, though.  We are not taking into account the entire life that led up to that decision, which might seem ridiculous to do, but is actually necessary for full understand of another person’s struggles.  Every decision that a person makes is a reflection of the events that have occurred in their life up to that point.

If someone becomes addicted to drugs or alcohol, then there was something that started them on that path.  It might be something that you might think is minuscule, but for the addict, it was something that damaged their life and led them to a choice that they might not have otherwise made. And that event and how it impacts the person is where they deviate from being someone that you can simply make snap judgments about.

Trying to learn about what makes a person make the decision to harm their own body or possibly cause their own death is not a way to excuse self-destructive behavior.  It is a way to learn what we as a society can do to prevent this kind of thing from happening in the future.  If our society starts to understand what causes people to do things that endanger their health, then maybe we can intervene in someone’s life before it is too late.  That may sound like something that is impossible or illogical to want to do, but maybe we need to think about doing the impossible or the illogical sometimes.  Clearly, thinking about things in a very stiff, victim-blaming way has not helped us to stop this kind of thing from happening.  Maybe compassion can stop this from being repeated.

Whether a person is drinking in such excess that an early death is likely or they’re smoking crack or they’re starving their body to appease their mind or if they’re cutting, it is important that we figure out why they’re doing this.  If we pay more attention to the people behind the “bad” behaviors and less attention to laughing at or making judgments of them, then we might be able to make greater attempts to save lives before it is too late.  If people had taken the time to understand the suffering that the self-destructive go through, then maybe the deaths of people like Amy Winehouse, Karen Carpenter, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, Rudy Lewis, Dickie Pride, Alan Wilson, Ron McKernan, Pete Ham, Gary Thain, Alexander Bashlachev, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kristen Pfaff, Sean Patrick McCabe, Jeremy Michael Ward, Bryan Ottoson, and so many others could have been prevented.  If we stopped looking at people with disdain over their choices and started looking at them with the concern that they deserve, then we might be able to prevent the next tragic death of a young, talented person.